Phantom-Wooer: The Thomas Lovell Beddoes Web Site | Critical Response

ARTHUR SYMONS, 1891

“Beddoes is always large, impressive; the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs...Beddoes’ genius was essentially lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you find one of those brief and memorable phrases--words from the heart--for which one would give much beautiful poetry...A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students not to readers, of English poetry, somewhere in the neighborhood of Ebenezer Jones and Charles Wells.”

(“The Poetical Works of Thomas Lovell Beddoes,” The Academy, vol. 40, p. 129)

Back

Home